Hacking Product Hunt For Getting Bunch Of First Few Downloads: The Story Of Shout App

Misbah Ashraf
Misbah is Chief growth officer at Spangle.

In Indian startup ecosystem, the startups in general are not that well connected to each other. Startup to startup interaction can bring wondrous achievements in India, to make it a possibility Veer and I are always trying to do something for bringing multiple startups together under one roof and we are always up for helping anyone as often as possible. To sum it up we are always throwing as many jabs as possible. (‘Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook’ is Gary Vaynerchuk’s Philosophy )

While reading my twitter news feed and I found some interesting tweets about Product Hunt meetup. Suddenly, a spark buzzed in my mind, I tweeted Ryan about organizing India’s first ever product hunt meetup.

After tweeting, I got a reply within seconds. They were ready to organize it here in India. Over next few mails, we decided the whole plan for the meetup and this is how it went.

Related: India’s First Ever Product Hunt Meetup.

Here’s how we threw an awesome Product Hunt meetup.

It was an awesome experience for me to organize a community building event. The meetup was very successful and ended with building a lot of connections between product hunters and innovators around the city.

But how did we went up on Product Hunt? & how did we trend there? Its all the part of JAB JAB JAB philosophy. When we are ready to launch our app (Shout) on 22nd Jan 2015, I used the meetup’s attendee list to get early users feedback which shaped into a nice honest review of the product. Many people thought that it should be posted on Product Hunt as people go there to discover such amazing apps. Many people tweeted about us and actually couple of top moderators actually posted about us. & We i.e. Shout was up on Product Hunt and from that point my growth plan came in action.

First. People started taking part in the conversations on our product hunt post. Many people liked the vision of making a hyper local twitter app. This helped us to get media attention also.

We got covered on lot of amazing platforms like Techcrunch, Adweek,Yourstory, Inc42, Bangalore Mirror. Further it really helped us in our organic growth.

In just a week of launching shout, we got hell number of downloads and hundreds of feedback which are helping us right now to build a better product to add lot of value to community.

60 percent of our downloads came from ‘spoken words’ by users on social media. 3o percent of our downloads came from PR and cold emailing to the communities we are attached in. Surprisingly, the open rate was 89 percent for us and, rest 1o percent came from pool of our ambassadors across US and India.

Read more about Shout here.

Conclusion: What i can only say to you is that if you want to get yourself featured on product hunt, which is a community driven app store, you have to become the part of that community first. Start interacting with people before even you have launched your app for public and start sharing the early access with some of the influential people you know. People are the people that will help you. & that is the secret, add value to them first and they will help you in future.

You have the secret solution now, take it ahead.

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